1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of natural language processing, and in particular, to identifying and extracting information from documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
A contract is a document that defines legally enforceable agreements between two or more parties. During the negotiation process, parties to the contract often agree to make multiple amendments or addendums, and these amendments or addendums can be stored in random formats in different locations.
Frequent changes in contracts often present challenges to conventional approaches for finding contracts and amendments, as conventional approaches typically focus on the unstructured text only and are not able to extract relevant and important information correctly. For example, a contract and amendments may include the clauses that contain wording such as “net 30 days,” “within 30 days,” “30 day's notice,” and “2% penalty.” On the other hand, one of the amendments may include the non-standard clauses such as “5 working days” with “60% penalty.” Without the ability to discover the clauses and types of the clauses accounting for their semantic variations, any party not keeping track of the amendments or the addendums is vulnerable to a significant amount of risk of overlooking unusual contractual terminologies.